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Sunday, January 2, 2011

Plums for peaceful purposes

Many years ago, plums were nothing more than seasonal munitions for an arms race of increasingly more powerful and dangerous slingshots, those were the days. I could never have imagined finding another, better use for them but it appears that time has come. Also, plums of this size would require a PVC pipe gun and it seems i've found another, more mature use for PVC as well... plumbing.Skinning these guys is a real effort. They don't go easy like tomatoes! In the end I had a good system going though. With a big pot of water boiling on the stove, I dropped the plums in (halved and left them to it for about thirty seconds. Then straight into a bowl of chilled water and ice cubes. Its much the same as with tomatoes but more aggressive and with a big stone in the middle that i'm going to use needle nose pliers on next time.This was the second harvest to be stewed and came in skinned at just over a kilo. Even though they are a yellow fleshed plum there is a layer of red just under the skin that stains everything it touches.The recipe I used called for a 3/4 cup of sugar and 1/2 a cup of water to 0.9kg of plums. It also mentioned something about a cinnamon stick which I chose to ignore. The water can also be ignored as I discovered. Your plums would have to be bone dry to need extra water and i found myself draining off 80% of the liquid to get everything to thicken. The plums only need about ten minutes to become soft on the brink of mushy.This is what its all about. Stewed plums still hot from the stove with vanilla ice cream. What could be better? Bombarding surrounding houses and spreading rubber band accelerated high velocity plum violence thoughout the community? Maybe there could be room for both.